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Scrivener with BibleWorks?

Anyone here using Scrivener? I just started using it for sermon prep. It is phenomenal.

Also (I'm not near a computer to be able to check this), BibleWorks verse note files are .rtf, right? That means that depending on what sort of sync capabilities there are with the BW notes folder, BibleWorks and Scrivener could be tied together quite nicely. Has anyone looked into this?

Anyone here using Scrivener? I just started using it for sermon prep. It is phenomenal.

Also (I'm not near a computer to be able to check this), BibleWorks verse note files are .rtf, right? That means that depending on what sort of sync capabilities there are with the BW notes folder, BibleWorks and Scrivener could be tied together quite nicely. Has anyone looked into this?

Hello Abram,

I don't have Scrivener, but I've been looking at it for the last couple months. It's Mac only if I'm not mistaken, right? From what I understand, it organizes all the pre-writing stages but isn't a word processor. So what are you using for a Word processor? I've been using Mac for windows, but have been increasingly frustrated with it. I'm in the midst of a research project for the moment, but once that's over, I'm seriously considering Mellel, which is supposed to be very flexible.

At this stage, I obviously don't have anything to say about your question, but tying Scrivener with BW9 seems very interesting. I for one would be keen to hear about your experiences!

There is a Windows version of Scrivener. I know very little about it, except that I have heard it's either almost all or entirely caught up to the Mac version, in terms of being full-featured. That's just hearsay, so it's worth checking out on your own, but if I used Windows more often, I'd want Scrivener there, too.

Yes, I think the App Store only gets you a Mac license, but it's possible they have some sort of option to accommodate you--if I were you, I'd contact them and ask directly, to see what they can do.

I've heard great things about Mellel, especially for processing Hebrew. Right now I'm just using Word for cleaning up formatting, and that is working for my purposes at the moment. Scrivener says it's not a word processor per se, but I have yet to see its limitations in this regard--you can print or make a pdf directly from Scrivener if you want.

There is a Windows version of Scrivener. I know very little about it, except that I have heard it's either almost all or entirely caught up to the Mac version, in terms of being full-featured. That's just hearsay, so it's worth checking out on your own, but if I used Windows more often, I'd want Scrivener there, too.

Yes, I think the App Store only gets you a Mac license, but it's possible they have some sort of option to accommodate you--if I were you, I'd contact them and ask directly, to see what they can do.

I've heard great things about Mellel, especially for processing Hebrew. Right now I'm just using Word for cleaning up formatting, and that is working for my purposes at the moment. Scrivener says it's not a word processor per se, but I have yet to see its limitations in this regard--you can print or make a pdf directly from Scrivener if you want.

Thanks for your reply Abram. Actually I'm not interested in the Windows version of Scrivener. I've been using Mac for several years and have no desire to change at this point. I have parallels with Windows 7 and about the only thing I use that for is BW9... which is still a bit nicer than the Mac version of BW9, IMO.

I'm happy to know that Scrivener can pretty much do everything from start to finish, although, from the sounds of it, any kind of research work that is complicated or destined for publication would still have to go through at word processor. Would that be your take?

Again, any info on linking BW notes to Scrivener interests me. I'll probably take the plunge in the next few months!

Anyone here using Scrivener? I just started using it for sermon prep. It is phenomenal.

Also (I'm not near a computer to be able to check this), BibleWorks verse note files are .rtf, right? That means that depending on what sort of sync capabilities there are with the BW notes folder, BibleWorks and Scrivener could be tied together quite nicely. Has anyone looked into this?

I use both (on Windows), but (for better or worse) I haven't really integrated the two. I use BW notes for Bible notes as I read the text, but if I'm working on a specific text for a sermon or whatever, I'll put the more sermon-centered notes in Scrivener rather than in BW. I don't have a fancy set up with Scrivener either. A folder for each season of the church year, subfolders for specific Sundays within the season, subfolders for Years A, B, and C within those and then text files for different lectionary specific ramblings/notes/service info.

Thanks for your reply Abram. Actually I'm not interested in the Windows version of Scrivener. I've been using Mac for several years and have no desire to change at this point. I have parallels with Windows 7 and about the only thing I use that for is BW9... which is still a bit nicer than the Mac version of BW9, IMO.

I'm happy to know that Scrivener can pretty much do everything from start to finish, although, from the sounds of it, any kind of research work that is complicated or destined for publication would still have to go through at word processor. Would that be your take?

Again, any info on linking BW notes to Scrivener interests me. I'll probably take the plunge in the next few months!

Blessings,

Don

Yes, that is my take, but I've only been using it for a month. I am fairly sure, however, the folks at Scrivener would also say how you have described it is right.

I've been away for awhile, so I hope this is still relevant. I've been using Scrivener for just over a year (it was recommended to me by a church friend who writes science fiction). It is a brilliant piece of software. I use the Windows version, and while there are a few things that the Mac version can do that haven't been ported to the Windows version yet, I haven't run into them. I think they're mostly fairly marginal.

I just tried dragging some BW notes files in .rtf format into Scrivener, and they came across perfectly. They are pretty simple files, but I suppose most notes files would be. Be aware that what happens when you do this is that Scrivener creates a copy of the file within its own folder structure, which it keeps track of through an internal indexing system. If you edit the file in Scrivener, your edits are not saved back to the BW notes file; you have to do that manually. This bothered me a bit at first, but Scrivener does so much else so well that I no longer mind; and I've come to understand the reasons that it works this way.

When writing a sermon these days, I'll do textual research in BW, then sometimes copy verses or passages into a Scrivener file. I organize my thoughts and draft paragraphs or more in Scrivener. Then I copy these over into Nota Bene for the actual final writing. I could also export them from Scrivener as RTF and import into NB.

Scrivener is an amazing organizational tool. It easily handles copying and pasting of Hebrew and Greek from BW (see the screenshot), and you can import images, Web pages, documents, etc. It's become an integral part of my research and writing process, and I recommend it. It was originally designed for fiction writers (and no preacher wants to be known as that, eh? ), but it is so flexible that you can use the parts of it you need in the way you want for whatever writing you're doing.

But, as others have said, it's not intended to be a full-featured word processor (though, interestingly, it is capable of publishing ebooks). For final formatting and tweaking of sophisticated documents, it's recommended that one export to a word processor.

And on that subject, Don, if you're shopping I hope you'll at least take a look at Nota Bene. It runs on Mac under either Parallels or WINE; I haven't used it on a Mac, but many report success. NB was created by a scholar for scholars, and its handling of multiple languages, standard word-processing tasks (want to transpose two words or two sentences with a single keystroke?), research databases, footnotes, and bibliographies is well above what Word can do, since Word's user base is a different one. NB is currently in the final pre-release stage of v. 10. I've been active in the beta testing, and I can say that the latest beta is essentially ready to use.